Day 9: Family Research Day

Now some people will wonder why of all the places in the world I could have gone on vacation—Madrid to see Cesar, Basque to see Maricruz, Norway to visit a former student, Italy that I fell in love with last November—why then would I choose Orkney, islands off the north coast of Scotland? And why would I drag along my non-world-traveling mom?

She is the reason, or at least part of it. It’s also for Granddaddy Tulloch (her father) and his brother Ralph. Uncle Ralph was one of those family members who works feverishly to trace the family genealogy, record the stories, save the family’s history. I’m convinced that every immigrant family has one, someone who wants to share his enthusiasm for the past with others. Uncle Ralph was that guy for our family, and he loved the role and the responsibility that accompanies it.

At various family reunions when I was a kid, I remembered Uncle Ralph telling Mom that he found a new date or a ship’s manifest or a headstone in a cemetery or a possible relative in another state who was willing to share research. She would say, “That’s great. Now whose father was he? How does that fit with other information you have?” I could tell she was interested but just didn’t have the time to follow it as closely as she wanted. With this kind of research, it’s important to stay close to it, keep it fresh in your mind. If not, you get lost in the generations.

Occasionally, Mom would ask my brother and me to go with her to some random cemetery to do some very specific headstone rubbings. In fact, she turned the rubbings into a Brownie/Girl Scout troop activity to earn a history badge of some kind. At the time, I viewed these things as time that could better be spent with friends, at the movies, or really… anywhere other than walking through row upon row of headstones looking for last names and birth/death dates when neither was visible due to the wear of weather and time.

I don’t recall exactly when it was, but sometime late in high school, I remember a family gathering of some kind (planned family reunions were eventually replaced by impromptu gatherings for funerals) where we ran into Uncle Ralph again. He lived just outside Orlando, so we didn’t see him often. And again, he had a new piece of information to share with Mom. Later at home, I asked her to explain what he was talking about. She recounted again how part of our family came to America (just before it became the United States) from Scotland. I say “part of the family” because the primary purpose began with tracing the Tulloch name.

The lineage looks something like this: my mom (a Tulloch before she and Dad married), then my grandfather James, his father George Walter, his father ____, his father ____, his father James Miller, and his father Magnus, my great-great-great-great-great grandfather who came to America in 1775 around age 8 with his parents (or maybe his aunt and uncle). They entered at Savannah, eventually moving to South Carolina, married Nancy Logan, had a few kids and moved to Blount County, Tennessee, where he later died and was buried. And almost 200 years after that line of the family arrived in America, I was born (1973).

So back to me in high school at that funeral... I remember Uncle Ralph saying something to the effect of: “Well, I think we’ve found everything we can find without going to Orkney, Scotland, and seeing the documents ourselves. I don’t know that I’ll ever get there. Kay [my mom], why don’t you put that on your list?” My mom laughed her that’s-a-ridiculous-idea laugh, which sounded like half a sigh and half a gasp. Having had a lot of ridiculous ideas over my 17 or so years, I was quite familiar with that laugh. She followed up with, “I would love to go to Orkney, but I don’t see that happening.” I knew then how cool it would be if I could one day take (or go with) Uncle Ralph and Mom to Orkney.

Uncle Ralph died the summer I left Florida for North Carolina. I visited him earlier that year. He took me to his favorite place for dinner, where every cute waitress in the room knew him by name and seemed to have more in common with him than I did. Afterwards, he went back to his house, and he seemed determined to share two things with me: 1) the role his Marine unit played in the South Pacific during World War II (their story was published a month or so after my visit); and 2) what he did and didn’t know about Tulloch history and how it was up to the family (my mom, his daughter Gail, maybe me) to carry on the research and pass along the history for generations to come. He never saw Orkney, but now I feel like we have seen it for him.

I’ll hold onto the rest of the details of the day—what we found, what we didn’t, what we must accept that we may never know. I will say that I feel that pull of wanting to know where you come from. And I understand that wanting to discover the past isn’t living in the past. It’s giving yourself new perspective, so you can write your own story in the present and in the future. For me, this trip was more about appreciating the relationship I have with my mom (and in fact, my entire family), and not so much about trying to find out whether John Tulloch and Janet Seaton had 4 kids or 5. But I have to admit that playing historical detective was fun, too. Mr. Heck (7th and 8th grade history) would be proud. Or maybe he would just say, “I told you so.” I’m OK with that.